Rarely does life offer a clear-cut crossroads, but Heather Willson, a 34-year resident of Japan, faced one squarely when she was 22 years old.
Willson poses with a friend's dog during a trip to Sweden in June. "I first came to Japan for one year during my undergraduate work in 1973, and I loved it so much I applied for an education ministry scholarship to return for graduate work," she said.While waiting to hear about the scholarship, Willson returned to her native Canada and settled into life there, equally loving the lively political atmosphere of Toronto."When I was given the scholarship, I actually turned it down at first, because I thought, if I go back to Japan, I'll never return to live in Canada. I really felt that choice, that it would almost be dangerous for me to go back to Japan."Although Willson initially refused, her professor at the University of Toronto finally convinced her to accept, and her premonition proved true: Willson stayed and made a life in Japan, coauthoring a guidebook on her adopted hometown of Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture.Even a crossroads, however, offers diverging paths, and the young Willson could never have predicted she would also some day open an English school in Cambodia.The choice of Japan itself was unpredictable. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, Willson lived in Canada until she was 19, and then, like many, traveled across Europe and Asia before entering college."Although I never made it as far as China, I was fascinated by Buddhism and China, so I decided to study Chinese, but when I entered the University of Toronto, I couldn't get into the Chinese class, so I had to take Japanese instead."This "accidental" introduction led Willson to modern Japanese literature and a year of study at Waseda University. She later spent time doing graduate research in Osaka and Hokkaido before going to Tokyo to work in the late 1970s.Introduced by mutual friends, Willson also met Yasuo Iwade, a young worker at a trading company. Although their meeting was rather unpredictable, the rest of the story is familiar. The two fell in love, married and moved to Kamakura to start a life together."We chose Kamakura since we both liked the beach and the ocean, and we wanted to get away from Tokyo." Willson and Iwade then had two children, prompting her to quickly adapt to life as a housewife and mother in the small community of Koshigoe on the Shonan coast."Fortunately, I had a lot of Japanese friends, but I also had a group of foreign women friends, and we all had kids the same age. For us mothers, it was great to have each other. We don't have our families here, so we sort of became each other's family, giving advice, handing out baby clothes and strollers."Although she taught a few private English lessons, Willson primarily stayed home with the children. Her husband worked at a variety of small companies before opening his own ecology consulting business, while Willson focused on their community. She served for several years in the school PTA and volunteered for various neighborhood committees.With her growing knowledge and appreciation for Kamakura life, Willson started a small monthly English newsletter called The Kamakura Post. She teamed up with local neighbor Satoko Furukawa, disseminating information on Kamakura traditions or covering places of historical interest.Willson's work on the newsletter naturally led to a deeper involvement in the wider Kamakura community."I had always loved traveling and wandering around Japan, so it was kind of natural for me to do that in Kamakura. Then going to different places in researching articles — like going to the city hall to ask questions about a certain festival — it got me more involved in the city and different communities."In 1995, as their children entered junior high school, Willson started teaching part-time at the international studies department at Meiji Gakuin University in Yokohama. As their children grew, Willson was able to accept a full-time position at the university, and with over 15 years already in Japan, it seemed her early premonition had proved a happy moment of divination.But the road diverged in fall 1999.Willson's husband was diagnosed with cancer and he died the following summer at 48. Six months later, Willson also lost Furukawa, her long-time Kamakura Post partner, to cancer.Another realization hit Willson, this one eventually leading to a path of healing. More than 500 people came to her husband's funeral: "It just struck me that what you do when you are alive is really important, that you can make a difference when you are alive. I wanted to do something that would remain, even after I am gone," she said.Slowly rebuilding her life, Willson set aside money and decided on Cambodia as the place where she would try to make a difference, although she had no specific plan."I picked Cambodia because it was one of the poorest countries in Asia, it was relatively close to Japan and it was a Buddhist country. In some Islamic countries, it is difficult for a woman to do things on her own, but I wanted to be able to do everything myself."Willson arranged to volunteer with the Japanese NPO Children without Borders on her first trip to Cambodia, and "things just fell into place."Willson met a young priest, Sovann Phon, who was running an English school out of one of the smaller, modern temples near Angkor Wat."I started talking to him, and everything he said was exactly what I wanted to do: build an English school in the countryside where there are no other aid organizations active, make it a free, after-school program to encourage the children to stay in their local schools. I just decided, then and there, this is what I am going to do."Willson was in Cambodia during the great Indonesian tsunami of 2004, planning their school. "We were in the countryside, so there was no electricity or anything, and we did not even hear about the tragedy until the next day."Eight months later, in September 2005, the Butterfly School opened. "We named the school Butterfly because even a small thing like a butterfly can brighten up a dismal scene, so a small thing like our school can make these kids' lives better," she said.The school is near Udong in the small village of Popeae, about an hour's ride by motorcycle north of Phnom Penh. It teaches 80 students, who range from elementary school kids to young adults."Hundreds of children wanted to come and we wanted to welcome all of them, but we try to keep only 20 students per class, with four classes every day in the late afternoon." In addition to Phon, Willson hired two other young Cambodian men to teach English.Willson visits at least once a year, but she keeps in regular email contact with Phon, who manages the school in addition to being head teacher. Apart from the occasional donation, however, the school's sole source of financial support is just Willson, who sends monthly remittances to pay for salaries, gasoline and other daily expenditures.Keeping abreast of the daily changes at the school helps keep her connected for when she can visit next."Sometimes I go just to provide teacher training; sometimes my Japanese students go or foreign friends volunteer at the school. I love going there. We don't have running water or electricity, and our lives are so simple, yet everyone is so happy. People wear the same thing every day; there's no materialism. Cambodia is so peaceful and they don't need material goods to be happy and function as a family. I get more from the people there than I give, I'm afraid."Willson retired from Meiji Gakuin this past spring to devote more time to Cambodia and other travel plans.Although she no longer actively contributes to The Kamakura Post, the small newsletter she started continues today with the help of a neighboring expat, under the name The Shonan Post.Her knowledge of Kamakura led to the 2008 publication of a guidebook, "An English Guide to Kamakura's Temples and Shrines," coauthored with friend and fellow Kamakura resident Kenji Kamio. She insists Kamio "did most of the work," but the book provides testimony to Willson's devotion for her adopted country.Although her path trespassed into tragedy with her husband's death, Willson keeps her eyes on the road ahead: "I have always loved traveling and wandering, discovering and appreciating new places."
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Eye-catcher: A parasol in a Kamakura shop. I stood then for the first time in the crowded clearing at the foot of the great bronze Buddha, calm washing over me with the incense smoke and a faint scent of the sea.That was half a lifetime ago. I go back when I can, and in the years since, the place has become a kind of gauge for me. I measure myself against it the way children measure themselves against height markings on a wall. Have I grown? Have I changed?Sometimes I go there alone to stand under the trees, to make sense of myself, my eyes on the wooded hills that cut Kamakura off from Yokohama and the sprawling metropolis of Tokyo, so near to the north yet so far away.I've visited this corner of Kanagawa Prefecture with friends, giggling over ice-cream cones, toes in the sand, looking out over the sparkling waters of Sagami Bay. I've taken my sister to unfold paper fortunes at the ancient Kencho-ji Temple, leaving our bad luck tied to tree branches in the grounds.One hot summer's day, at a tiny restaurant comfortably cool in the vivid green shade of Japanese maples, one of my host families treated me to the best soba noodles I've ever had, while we caught up on the three years since I'd lived at their house
Kamakura's great 13th-century bronze Buddha. One chilly December, my mother and I explored the rambling hill and the gardens at the Hase-dera Temple.Then, though I'm not the praying type, in the breathless summer that ran excitedly toward my wedding, I was again in Kamakura — to make a quiet wish of hope at Tsurugaoka Hachiman-gu Shrine with the man who is now my husband.Back in high school, when I was uniformed in pleated blue from Monday to Friday (and for a half-day on Saturday), I'd most often go by myself on Sundays and holidays. I loved Kamakura as I loved nowhere else in Japan.Always, it was my refuge from the Yokohama suburb where I was hosted as an exchange student for the year. But it was also the only place I knew where I could wipe the mist off the glass of the present and look back into an older Japan, into the deeper history that fascinated me but which I found elusive elsewhere.At 16, I loved the place because it had the calm I didn't have inside myself. Time and history give a place depth, perspective, and Kamakura is old enough for that. At 16 I longed for both.
The Hase-dara Temple and its carp pond (below left) I didn't know, then, that Kamakura had once been the capital, the seat of a shogun's government. I didn't know it had given its name to a period of Japanese history. I loved it all the same, and weekend after weekend, I found myself standing at the edge of the clearing, looking up into the calm green face of the remarkable Buddha.Knowledge of a place deepens with time. At university, I studied Japanese history. In a lecture room halfway around the world from Japan, I learned about the Kamakura Period (1192-1333), which I reimagined through the lens of my own teenage years.In my mind, I played the ambitious Minamoto no Yoritomo, who became Japan's first shogun in 1192, my parents taking the role of the Emperor. I pushed for a change in power structures, and struck out away from my family and home.Yoritomo, too, pushed away from Imperial power in Kyoto, and established a new power base at his home in Kamakura. Surrounding himself with retainers and administrators from other powerful families, he made Kamakura an unofficial capital, while the Imperial capital at Kyoto retained official status. He called this a bakufu, which literally means "tent government." The Emperor gave him the status of Shogun.My year in Yokohama was my bakufu.
When Minamoto no Yoritomo died, authority drifted back to Kyoto. Emperor Go-Daigo managed, briefly, to re-establish Imperial power during the seven-year Kenmu Restoration. But military might prevailed, and the Ashikaga clan took power — and held on to it for more than 200 years.After my year in Japan, I, too, returned tentatively to the old system, moving back home, readjusting to the old model of authority. It didn't last for me, either, and as soon as I graduated I was off like a shot.I knew nothing of this at 16, only that Kamakura had once been an important city that had dwindled to a seaside resort whose weathered wooden temples were interspersed with souvenir shops selling wood and paper fans and postcards of the green bronze Buddha.I loved Kamakura simply because it was laid-back. I loved those smells of the sea, of incense, and of those forested hills cutting it off from the sprawl. I loved, too, its sense of a continuity reaching back into a distant past I could only guess at. I loved the green bamboo and the tumbled bushes of hydrangea loaded in the rainy season with their great blue blooms.Then there was the way the beach culture met ancient temples seemingly without irony. Surfers turned longboards across the curving crests of small waves, and lithe bronzed teenagers sunned themselves on the beach. (Feeling startlingly white, my American friend and I once went to a tanning salon, only to emerge sore and red, and as gangly and awkward as before.)I momentarily longed for that kind of freedom. I didn't realize that by being in Japan, or going alone to Kamakura for the day, I had been given an incredible kind of freedom. I pushed the edges of that freedom, testing to see how big it was. But instead of seeing the vast expanses inside, all I noticed were the boundaries, where it stopped.But Kamakura seemed like a place of possibility, too. Partly this was because of the anonymity. As a foreign exchange student I was used to sticking out. In Yokohama, I knew there were people watching me — not maliciously, but out of simple curiosity because I was different.In Kamakura there were tourists. I lived in Japan, spoke the language, and understood something of the culture. There, instead of being an outsider, I could feel like an insider.Returning later, in my older teens and 20s, I began to see myself and my relationship with Japan with more perspective. I began to see Kamakura more clearly too.History has washed over the town, layering temples upon shrines, and time has built gelato shops next to traditional tea houses. Looking back now, I see that my own history has deepened and broadened me, too. Kamakura itself has become a thread that weaves through my experience, knotting me back to my own past and tying me, however tenuously, into the history of the place.